One 77-year-old’s search for the truth: 9/11, election fraud, illegal wars, Wall Street criminality, a stolen nuke, the neocon wars, control of the U.S. government by global corporations, the unjustified assault on Social Security, media complicity, and the "Great Recession" about to become the second Great Depression. "The most important truths are hidden from us by the powerful few who strive to steal the American dream by keeping We the People in the dark."

Saturday, September 14, 2013

"John Pilger is the most important voice of our time." -- Paul Craig Roberts

The silent military coup that took over WashingtonThis time it's Syria, last time it was Iraq. Obama chose to accept the entire Pentagon of the Bush era: its wars and war crimes

Children, many of whose deformities are believed to be the results of
the chemical dioxin that the US used in the Vietnam war, play outside a
hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. Photograph: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

On my wall is the Daily Express front page of September 5 1945
and the words: "I write this as a warning to the world." So began Wilfred Burchett's report from Hiroshima.
It was the scoop of the century. For his lone, perilous journey that
defied the US occupation authorities, Burchett was pilloried, not least
by his embedded colleagues. He warned that an act of premeditated mass
murder on an epic scale had launched a new era of terror.

Almost
every day now, he is vindicated. The intrinsic criminality of the atomic
bombing is borne out in the US National Archives and by the subsequent
decades of militarism camouflaged as democracy. The Syria psychodrama
exemplifies this. Yet again we are held hostage by the prospect of a
terrorism whose nature and history even the most liberal critics still
deny. The great unmentionable is that humanity's most dangerous enemy
resides across the Atlantic.

John Kerry's farce and Barack Obama's pirouettes are temporary. Russia's peace deal over chemical weapons
will, in time, be treated with the contempt that all militarists
reserve for diplomacy. With al-Qaida now among its allies, and US-armed
coupmasters secure in Cairo, the US intends to crush the last
independent states in the Middle East: Syria first, then Iran. "This
operation [in Syria]," said the former French foreign minister Roland
Dumas in June, "goes way back. It was prepared, pre-conceived and planned."

When
the public is "psychologically scarred", as the Channel 4 reporter
Jonathan Rugman described the British people's overwhelming hostility to
an attack on Syria, suppressing the truth is made urgent. Whether or
not Bashar al-Assad or the "rebels" used gas in the suburbs of Damascus, it is the US, not Syria, that is the world's most prolific user of these terrible weapons.

In
1970 the Senate reported: "The US has dumped on Vietnam a quantity of
toxic chemical (dioxin) amounting to six pounds per head of population."
This was Operation Hades, later renamed the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand
– the source of what Vietnamese doctors call a "cycle of foetal
catastrophe". I have seen generations of children with their familiar,
monstrous deformities. John Kerry, with his own blood-soaked war record,
will remember them. I have seen them in Iraq too, where the US used
depleted uranium and white phosphorus, as did the Israelis in Gaza. No
Obama "red line" for them. No showdown psychodrama for them.

The
sterile repetitive debate about whether "we" should "take action"
against selected dictators (ie cheer on the US and its acolytes in yet
another aerial killing spree) is part of our brainwashing. Richard Falk,
professor emeritus of international law and UN special rapporteur on
Palestine, describes it as "a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral
screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed
as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political
violence". This "is so widely accepted as to be virtually
unchallengeable".

It is the biggest lie: the product of "liberal
realists" in Anglo-American politics, scholarship and media who ordain
themselves as the world's crisis managers, rather than the cause of a
crisis. Stripping humanity from the study of nations and congealing it
with jargon that serves western power designs, they mark "failed",
"rogue" or "evil" states for "humanitarian intervention".

An attack on Syria or Iran or any other US "demon" would draw on a fashionable variant, "Responsibility to Protect", or R2P – whose lectern-trotting zealot is the former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans, co-chair of a "global centre"
based in New York. Evans and his generously funded lobbyists play a
vital propaganda role in urging the "international community" to attack
countries where "the security council rejects a proposal or fails to
deal with it in a reasonable time".

Evans has form. He appeared in my 1994 film Death of a Nation,
which revealed the scale of genocide in East Timor. Canberra's smiling
man is raising his champagne glass in a toast to his Indonesian
equivalent as they fly over East Timor in an Australian aircraft, having
signed a treaty to pirate the oil and gas of the stricken country where
the tyrant Suharto killed or starved a third of the population.

Under
the "weak" Obama, militarism has risen perhaps as never before. With
not a single tank on the White House lawn, a military coup has taken
place in Washington. In 2008, while his liberal devotees dried their
eyes, Obama accepted the entire Pentagon of his predecessor, George
Bush: its wars and war crimes. As the constitution is replaced by an
emerging police state, those who destroyed Iraq with shock and awe,
piled up the rubble in Afghanistan and reduced Libya to a Hobbesian
nightmare, are ascendant across the US administration. Behind their
beribboned facade, more former US soldiers are killing themselves than
are dying on battlefields. Last year 6,500 veterans took their own lives. Put out more flags.

The
historian Norman Pollack calls this "liberal fascism": "For
goose-steppers substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of
the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer
manqué, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling
all the while." Every Tuesday the "humanitarian" Obama personally
oversees a worldwide terror network of drones that "bugsplat" people,
their rescuers and mourners. In the west's comfort zones, the first
black leader of the land of slavery still feels good, as if his very
existence represents a social advance, regardless of his trail of blood.
This obeisance to a symbol has all but destroyed the US anti-war
movement – Obama's singular achievement.

In Britain, the
distractions of the fakery of image and identity politics have not quite
succeeded. A stirring has begun, though people of conscience should
hurry. The judges at Nuremberg were succinct: "Individual citizens have
the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and
humanity." The ordinary people of Syria, and countless others, and our
own self-respect, deserve nothing less now.

About Me

B.S. in Physics, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1960 Ph.D. in Physics, Brown University, 1966. Fellow, American Physical
Society. Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Fellow, American Ceramic Society. Member, Geological Society of America, Research Physicist at Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Washington, DC,
1967-2001. Fulbright-García Robles Fellow at Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, 1997. Invited Professor of Research at Universités
de Paris-6 & 7, Lyon-1, et St-Etienne (France) and Tokyo Institute
of Technology, 2000-2004. Adjunct Professor of Materials Science and
Engineering, University of Arizona, 2004-2005. Consultancy: impactGlass
research international, 2005-present.
Winner, one national and two international research awards and honored
by Brown University with a "Distinguished Graduate School Alumnus
Award." Author, 198 papers in peer-reviewed journals and books, Principal Author of 114 of these.